Colombian girl, 10, gives birth

Today the British Daily Mail reported on the tragic story of a 10-year-old Colombian girl who gave birth last week.

At 39 weeks, the girl arrived at a local hospital in pain with tears streaming down her face, according to Univision’s Primer Impacto.

She underwent a Caesarean section and doctors delivered a healthy 5-pound female baby. This was the girl’s first time seeing a doctor since becoming pregnant.

The unnamed girl is a member of the indigenous Wayuu tribe who live in the La Guajira Peninsula in the north of the country. It’s becoming more common for young tribe members to become pregnant but police can’t press charges against the fathers because the tribe has autonomy and its own jurisdiction.

The unnamed girl made national news in Colombia and the press is speculating that the father is either a 15-year-old boy or a 30-year-old man. The Wayuu tribe isn’t releasing any information on the father.

We can only hope that increased awareness of the situation will help put a stop to young girls becoming pregnant.

“We’ve already seen similar cases of Wayuu girls,” Efraín Pacheco Casadiego, director of the hospital where the girl gave birth, told RCN La Radio noticias, the Huffington Post reported. “At a time when girls should be playing with dolls, they go to having to take care of a baby. It’s shocking.”

The girl is one of the youngest mothers ever, but she’s not the youngest. A Peruvian child named Lina Medina reportedly gave birth at age 5 in 1939. In the U.S. the youngest children to ever give birth were age 9.